AECOM, the world’s trusted infrastructure consulting firm, announced that it will partner with ADASTEC Corp, a leading technology supplier in the automated vehicle industry, to advance AECOM’s patent-pending, AV-ReadiTM tool. The AV-Readi tool is a first-of-its-kind solution developed by AECOM that enables infrastructure owners and operators to quantify the readiness of their roadways to support the deployment and operation of automated vehicles. Through integration with ADASTEC’s SAE Level-4 Automated Driving Software Platform, flowride.ai, the AV-Readi tool will help define industry standards and advance the implementation of automated public transport solutions globally. AECOM recently filed a patent for the AV-Readi tool to bolster its ongoing development and deployment.
“Our new collaboration with ADASTEC represents a major step forward for the AV-Readi tool, which has already supported automated vehicle routing for numerous infrastructure owners and operators across the U.S. and Canada,” said Suzanne Murtha, AECOM’s global lead of connected and automated technology. “With the automated vehicles market expected to grow rapidly in the coming decade, we’re proud to partner with an industry leader to shape that growth and safely realize the immense potential of AV technologies.”
The AV-Readi tool delivers state-of-the-art analysis of roadway environments without the need for site assessments, providing users with rapid insights into barriers to deployment for automated passenger, transit and goods vehicles. Capable of analyzing data from a wide variety of roadways, including highways, urban and suburban streets, airports, and ports, the tool can quantify environmental complexities, such as road user behavior, merges, roundabouts and pedestrian crossings, to help determine ideal AV routes and identify infrastructural and technological interventions that support AV deployment.
“The AV-Readi tool does far more than identify environmental obstacles; it quantifies deployment readiness at each segment of a route, yielding data that can inform infrastructure and technology enhancements,” said Paul Avery, AECOM’s automation and data technical lead. “Unlike existing technologies, the AV-Readi tool takes a truly quantitative approach, assessing a route from the perspective of an automated vehicle. This allows it to reduce the time needed to assess the feasibility of routes from several months to as little as under a week.”
“Our partnership with AECOM and their AV-Readi tool has made our initial deployment steps more agile,” said Dr. Ali Peker, chief executive officer of ADASTEC Corp. “With the aid of AV-Readi, we can initiate our deployments without the need for a physical site visit. This is a crucial step for us as we have deployments in four different continents. It’s a huge leap forward for us in terms of mass deployment.”
The AV-Readi tool has an array of functionalities, and can support platoon routing options, the use of dedicated lanes, and the optimization of certain social and environmental outcomes, such as routing freight to minimize community impacts. To date, the AV-Readi tool has been used to analyze over 6,000 miles of roadways and has been used by NJ Transit, MARTA, MDOT, PennDOT, Maryland DOT and several AV developers.
